Board Game Arena

Lately I've been seeing skipping player's turns as a safety against losing. For a variety of reasons, and often due to bga's own servers, you can run out of time. And people ignore it until it becomes obvious that they're gong to lose and then force the game to end.

I'd suggest a restriction that players can only time someone else out every X games to prevent abuse. Or to classify bad faith turn skipping as a reportable offense, same as King making. At least as long as bga's servers have obvious problems.

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Completely agree. And for games with 3 or more players need voting to skip player. At least half of players should agree to skip.

In my opinion there are general problems with this skipping funktion. I don't see the practical use. When a player is skipped the game normally is "damaged" or totally broken, so going further makes neither fun nor sense as in the end all are declared "winner", if they quit "without penalty" or not.
So why continue the game?

The normal way would be that the remaining players can decide to abort the game when one player apparently left. If everyone votes "yes" (the player out of time is not relevant, of course). The game is deleted then, no trace at all, no ELO changes etc. OK, this might be frustrating.

Instead of aborting the game there could be an option to set it to turn-based. If the player out of time only had connection issues he may come back later?

I've disliked that skipping function since it was created. I stopped coming here for 8 months because of it. (Yes, I hate it that much.)

It can be abused, yes. And I also agree that a majority of players should have to agree. If they don't agree, they can certainly choose to leave the game without penalty, which is what I usually do, but having a majority agree would help one person who's losing from abusing it.

Not to mention the idea of everyone ending in a tie. I don't see how that's useful to the person with the highest ELO. Part of the point was that people would leave a game when they were losing, and then all those people put in that time for an unfinished game, and whoever would have won gets screwed of their win. If everyone just ties, that last point about the winner not getting their win is pretty meaningless, don't you think?

And yes, often it breaks the game. IMO, it nearly always breaks it. If it's near the end, like on a last round, then no it probably doesn't, but that's when it's most vulnerable to abuse.

And it's almost completely useless for turn-based, which is what I mostly do. Again, take a live feature and just dump it into the turn-based whether it "fits" or not. I have yet to see anyone abandon a turn-based game because they're losing. Ever. (Except Perudo and I'm not entirely convinced there's not a misunderstanding going on there.) Most of the time they never take a turn at all, or they leave after only a few turns. I have seen people stay around longer, rarely, but not enough into the game to know who's winning. This doesn't mean someone hasn't experienced this, but it seems to me it'd be rare. Seriously, most people who abandon a turn-based game do it towards the beginning - they simply don't play. So there's really no point to the thing.

Most of the deficiencies in live games exists in turn-based. (Like ending in a tie.) Usually when someone wants to skip a turn, I choose to abandoned it, with few exceptions. (I'm waiting to get a red thumb for that, but I also usually put something in the chat.) I also find a lot of other players just abandon it, so the person who did the skipping is left with a 2 player with someone who isn't there.

It would be SOOOOOOOOO much easier in a turn-based game if we could just go back to expelling people. Most people had some leniency about this, and it's a faster, easier way to just get rid of the game. Or at least have the option between skipping and expelling.